SATA raid problems

Mr Spoon

Mr Spoon

Mr Spoon

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just installed my new motherboard (a8n32-sli deluxe) and having problems setting up a sata raid as a boot disk.
I have enabled RAID in the main bios and enabled the 2 drives there.
When i go into the MediaShield raid setup page (F10), I can select the raid ok but when I get back to the main screen " Set Boot" is disabled and under "Boot" it shows "N/A"
"[N] New Array" is also disabled.

I tried installing XP but because the disk is not set as a boot drive it wont install the boot files.

any ideas :confused:
 
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I dont know about your bios particularly but within that what is your boot device set to - for RAID it is usually something slightly less obvious
 
no cause the manual tells you to create the raid using the nvidia raid bios screens and then select the raid as bootable. then install windows.
ive tried all combinations. not sure what else to do. unless I just ditch the RAID idea.
does RAID use much CPU usage anyway ?
 
Sometimes I see that when I'm creating a RAID array. Weirdly enough, it doesn't stop me installing XP. You used the RAID drivers (F6 during install) didn't you? That's odd - umm... hmm... I'm stumped on how I got around this.
 
yea I can create the RAID, and can even format it from a dos boot disk (FAT32), the weird thing is that it is extemely quick to format, like 5 - 10 seconds.

If i get XP to format it in NTFS it takes ages.

Then I can install windows but it doesnt copy the boot up files, and when i reboot it says "missing NTLDR", i check the contents of C:\ (when it was fat32) and a windows folder is there looking complete, but no other files in root c:\
 
Aaaa - are there any other hard drives in the system when you install windows. Remove ALL other hard drives apart from the array when installing windows - chances are that windows (as it usually does) puts the ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini on a separate disk when installing on a RAID.

If this isn't the case, then I shall go back to pondering.
 
Mr Spoon said:
theres only 2 hard disks (the raided disks), im baffled :confused:
Click to expand...
OK... me too now!

Have you tried going back into the RAID BIOS and seeing if the set boot option is now there?
 
yea the option is there, the raided disk 138Gb but it still doesnt allow me to set it bootable in the (F10) RAID controller screen.
 
I have the same setup. My AN8-SLi chip-set fan died so I bought the A8N32-SLi and was faced with the exact same problem when setting the RAID.
The only difference being that my RAID was already built and all I needed to do was plug it in and set the BIOS options.
Not so fast! as soon as it got through the BIOS on the first boot the Windows splash screen booted up and then blue screen and crash, that happened twice. I checked all my settings and when I tried to do a Windows reinstall their were no hard drives?

My only option was to take it to my local shop who managed to reinstall Windows for me and get the RAID working again. They told me in the shop that the RAID drivers were the wrong ones and that I needed something (I don't recollect) about a bootable disk available from Symnatec I think.

It all sounded vaguely familiar so I got it home and it works within reason, however I thought I'd check the BIOS and try a Windows reinstall and even though I am using the PC now I can still not see the HDD when I try to reinstall Windows via booting from the CDROM?

If you figure this one out let me know ;)
 
Urm not sure, the 1205 adds extra SATA RAID compatibility. I haven't double checked it as I am doing a format recovery at the moment, but when thats done I need to reformat everything and start again.

It definitly detected them in windows after rebooting when I flashed the BIOS.
 
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